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David Miscavige (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Advertising's easy when the world loves you. When the pitchforks are out -- when you're BP after the Deepwater Horizon spill, say, or Coca-Cola amid the sugary drinks backlash -- that's where it gets tricky. The more you feel you need to get your message out, the less anyone's willing to hear it.

That's the dilemma the Church of Scientology found itself in this week with the publication of "Going Clear,"Lawrence Wright's exhaustive and damning investigation into the practices of America's most disparaged religion. Scientology's response: buying space on The Atlantic's website for a piece of "sponsor content" lauding the accomplishments of the Church's "ecclesiastical leader," David Miscavige.

We screwed up. It shouldn't have taken a wave of constructive criticism -- but it has -- to alert us that we've made a mistake, possibly several mistakes. We now realize that as we explored new forms of digital advertising, we failed to update the policies that must govern the decisions we make along the way. It's safe to say that we are thinking a lot more about these policies after running this ad than we did beforehand.
In the meantime, we have decided to withdraw the ad until we figure all of this out. We remain committed to and enthusiastic about innovation in digital advertising, but acknowledge -- sheepishly -- that we got ahead of ourselves. We are sorry, and we're working very hard to put things right.

That its policies would be still evolving is no surprise. The Atlantic has been around for 155 years, plenty of time to develop customs for differentiating editorial from advertising from advertorial. Digital sponsored content -- aka "native" advertising -- has existed only as long as the internet, and it's really only the last couple years that it's come to be seen as a primary engine of growth for innovation-friendly publishers like The Atlantic, Buzzfeed and Gawker Media (and you can add FORBES to that list as well).

The vehemence of the backlash here and the swiftness of The Atlantic's reaction have telescoped what are really two issues into one, so let's unpack it. The first is: Should The Atlantic be taking advertising from Scientology?

A lot of people would say it shouldn't. A lot of people would also say responsible media companies shouldn't take ad dollars from oil companies, gun makers, fast food chains, junk food manufacturers, foreign governments with questionable human rights records, etc., or from financial firms with ties to any of the foregoing. (Indeed, Salon's Alex Pareene asks on Twitter, "Why is 'sponsor content' from Scientology so much more horrible than 'sponsor content' from, say, Shell?")

For the most part, mainstream media organizations reserve the right to accept all these types of advertising while refusing any individual ads they deem offensive or unethical. Even The New York Times, which styles itself the gold standard in most matters, doesn't have any explicit policies that would prevent it from taking Scientology's dollars (unless you count the rule against advertising "occult pursuits," and I'm not going near that one).

The second issue is whether The Atlantic handled this particular piece of sponsor content in the right way. It obviously didn't, particularly in screening out negative comments in a way that created an Astroturf-like false impression of favorable reader response.

Would anyone have noticed if the Church of Scientology's bad odor hadn't ensured a high degree of scrutiny? Probably not. Should that bad odor alone have been enough to get this advertorial spiked? Definitely not.